Untidy desk? Seven great chaos-savers

There just never seems to be enough hours in the day for filing. Or so it seems in my office. Here are some great tips for dealing with an untidy desk, courtesy of my action learning set on the LEAD course:

But  before the tips, here’s a really important question to ask yourself if your desk is groaning under the weight of paper and before it all gets out of hand… “How important is this to me?” and “Is it affecting my business?”. Only you know the answers.

We are all different after all. So if you are someone who thrives off a degree of chaos, but would like it slightly more organised, then these tips are for you…

• Your computer filing is probably immaculate, so use a scanner for all those scratty pieces of paper we all collect
• Put appointments onto computer calendar straight away – then shred the paper
• File business-cards to Outlook/Address book while they are still fresh in your mind. Manually or with a cardreader – just do it!
• Action paperwork when it comes in – action, file or bin
• Make it a discipline. Allocate one day a week to ‘tidy desk day’.
• Use a notice board to get stuff off your desk
• Use Google desktop to index documents. Go down the electronic route wherever possible
• Acquire some filing cabinets where all the paper can be in one place

Finally, two ‘desperate’ measures.

• Get an administrator in
• Move desk/office/house to a tidier one.

Now that’s an idea…